Excellent but brief article on an awesome multi-family project that is targeting the Certified Passive House standard. I remember being asked to estimate the work involved in certification and then being invited to a public talk on this project not realizing they were the same. It was pretty fun sitting there and hearing Catherine Spencer talk about the dramatic benefits …
So air pollution is not only stupid but makes you stupid especially if you are male and older. Wow! Sometimes you can’t make this stuff up. This article in The Guardian is pretty scary especially as air pollution is an issue in many NZ cities in the winter. As we spend much of our time indoors most of folks exposure …
This article starts by reminding us of the finance industries poor ethical practices of charging dead people fees but soon moves on to the similarly un-ethical dilemmas in how we choose to build buildings. Sometime I’m in shock when someone asks why we need to predict and understand how buildings perform before they are built; especially when you hear experts …
This bill is about tax treatments; to encourage property owners with low cost rentals to invest in energy efficiency – especially the building fabric. But from my perspective the point from this article is how horrible split incentives are. We have this same split incentive issue in NZ. The split where landlords pay for the building and capital upgrades but …
I see mouldy houses quite a bit in my work but this Spinoff article still shocks me with the impacts on occupants. Most of the bad buildings in this article are in Wellington, because that’s where the writer is located, but I’ve seen even worse examples in Auckland and Christchurch. The statistics are pretty grim with over 40,000 children hospitalized …
Sustainable Engineering is putting together a page on all of the New Zealand Certified Passive House Projects. We will start with projects we have certified ourselves and then add in all of the remaining ones certified by others. The intent is to put up the sort of data that we ourselves tend to want to know about projects; like floor …
This past March at the Passive House Conference in Munich, Germany, I had the opportunity to meet with Dieter Herz of Herz and Lang. One of the founding members of a very experienced & prestigious passive house design consulting firm in Europe. During our discussion and later in his presentation, I was a bit surprised at the level of emphasis he …
“Heat deaths are preventable. No more excuses: we need better regulation and guidance to stop unsafe housing being built” If you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail. If you do not model and understand how a building is going to perform. To predict overheating, to understand it, and fix it before it is built. Then don’t be surprised …
This article from the Otago Daily Times is pretty shocking. It’s amazing to feel the scale of the problem when you think about one-third of all the hospital missions due to poor quality housing. If it is even close to accurate that’s an outrageous amount of money. Think how much we save on health care and misery as a society …
